Europe within Reach: Netherlandish Travellers on the Grand Tour and Beyond (1585-1750)

摘要

Europe within Reach allows readers of English access to more of the groundbreaking research that Gerrit Verhoeven has recently published in several articles on travel and tourism. This latest contribution is Diane Webb's highly readable (and occasionally colloquial) translation of Verhoeven's 2009 Dutch work, Anders reisen? Evoluties in vroegmoderne reiservaringen van Hollandse en Brabantse elites (1600-1750). Scholars frequently build arguments about travel on the basis of published literature alone but Europe within Reach turns to archives in Amsterdam, Leiden, The Hague, Antwerp and Brussels, incorporating journals that chart 139 journeys from Holland in the Dutch Republic and Brabant in the Spanish/Austrian Netherlands between the late sixteenth and the mid-eighteenth centuries. The book combines empirical research with theoretical insights, drawing on a multi-lingual bibliography of over 50 pages; the synthesis of Dutch and German writing is, indeed, among its many significant contributions. Verhoeven brings a systematic approach to a topic that is too often treated anecdotally, at least in English-language scholarship, and his move 'beyond' the Grand Tour is extremely welcome, placing it among various forms of 'travel behaviour'.